Payment Authorization in Smart Environments: Security-Convenience Balance.

One of the major roadblocks to mass adoption of smart environments and IoT services (and IoE in future) is the lack of ubiquitous solutions for passive and at the same time secure payment authorization at physical locations where services are provided. The main research goal of this work is to comprehensively evaluate such system proposed by the authors. When customers approach a point of sale it identifies them using face biometrics. After the order is completed, the system takes advantage of multimodal context-aware payment authorization to make a multi-criteria selection of the authorization method, optimally to make the whole process fully passive. All this enables a controlled balance between payment security and convenience for the client and for the seller. Empirical tests at an existing point of sale have been performed, the usage data have been collected, statistically analyzed and confronted with formulated research hypotheses.